[PvK]

We had a good discussion of the measurement issue in an earlier Proportions thread. Some general conclusions were and are:

1. "kT" must be taken abstractly in many cases. It can be interpreted in many ways, few of them equating directly to kilotons mass.

2. Proportions population mass of 1000kT per 1 million colonists was taken with actual mass in mind, but it does not only include the mass of the people themselves. If it did, your population would arrive nude and starving on an alien world, and would die immediately. I do NOT assume that every empire starts with super-efficient cryogenic storage (or ANY cryogenic storage). I do assume that they need clothing, food, drink, atmosphere support, shelter, tools, medicine, construction equipment, power generators, raw materials, spare parts, and a thousand other things. In sum, I'm being extremely generous with my estimate of the required mass to successfully move one million colonists to an alien world and to have them arrive in a condition where they will be able not only to survive there, but to start building a space age industrial/military colony, etc. However, see #1 above - kT is only meaningful in terms of what you can DO with it in the game.

3. There are many very goofy numbers in the default set (or Proportions) if you try to take kT literally. It's generally exaggerated by at least 1000 times, unless you imagine fighter units to be entire squadrons, etc, which is entirely reasonable. It's all a matter of interpretation.

PvK